It was sometime before 1850 at a remote Arctic hunting camp near the southwest edge of King William Island, an Arctic island 1,300 km northwest of what is now Iqaluit, Nunavut. And these “beings” had seemingly materialized out of nowhere.

“They’re not Inuit; they’re not human,” was how a woman, badly shaking with fright, first reported their arrival to the assembled camp.

Photo by Matthias Breiter An igloo glows by the light of a seal oil lamp under the Northern lights.

They were all gathered in an igloo. The men of the camp were away seal hunting, leaving only the women, children and one old man.

As the group tried to process the terrifying reality of what they’d just heard, the crunching footsteps of the strangers got closer.

“Everyone got scared. Very, very scared,” was how the Gjoa Haven shaman Nicholas Qayutinuaq described the encounter to historian Dorothy Eber in 1999. The story was included in Eber’s 2008 book Encounters on the Passage.

These Inuit were among the most isolated people on earth. Although they knew of Europeans, they had never met a white person. They had never even met Dene.

Public domainThe 1864 British painting Man Proposes, God Disposes, by Edwin Landseer, which is said to be inspired by the lost Franklin Expedition.

Finally, as the footsteps stopped just outside the igloo, it was the old man who went out to investigate.

He emerged to see a disoriented figure seemingly unaware of his presence. The being was touching the outside of the igloo with curiosity, and raised no protest when the old man reached his hand out to touch its cheek.

His skin was cold.

“I’ve never in all my life seen a devil or a spirit, these things are not human,” is how Inuit oral history records the old man’s first thoughts.

The figures, of course, were the last survivors of the Franklin Expedition. They had buried their captain. They had seen their ship entombed by ice. They had eaten the dead to survive.

And now, they were 5,000 km from home, in the last days of a futile bid to escape the Canadian Arctic on foot.

When the Inuit saw them off King William Island, the men were still hundreds of kilometres from any fur trading post or whaling station that could possibly mount a rescue.

Historian Dorothy Eber called these scenes “the death marches.”

Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesFrom a painting by W Turner Smith depicting Franklin Expedition members attempting to leave the Arctic on foot.

A renowned chronicler of Inuit culture, Eber spent decades travelling the north and collecting Inuit oral history. Her 1970 book, Pitseolak: Pictures Out of My Life, is credited as the first book to be published in Inuktitut after the Bible.

In the 1990s, Eber turned her sights on getting the Inuit perspective on the age of Arctic exploration. What emerged was a cornucopia of stories detailing ghostly encounters with doomed men.

Owen Beattie/University of AlbertaThis color photo shows the preserved body of John Torrington, a petty officer on the Franklin Arctic expedition who died in the spring of 1846. Scientist exhumed the body from its rock-piled grave in the permafrost of Beechey Island in the early 1980s.

Indigenous groups across the Americas had all encountered Europeans differently. But where other coastal groups such as the Haida or the Mi’kmaq had met white men who were well-fed and well-dressed, the Inuit frequently encountered their future colonizers as small parties on the edge of death.

“I’m sure it terrified people,” said Eber, 91, speaking to the National Post by phone from her Toronto home.

And it’s why, as many as six generations after the events of the Franklin Expedition, Eber was meeting Inuit still raised on stories of the two giant ships that came to the Arctic and discharged columns of death onto the ice.

Inuit nomads had come across streams of men that “didn’t seem to be right.” Maddened by scurvy, botulism or desperation, they were raving in a language the Inuit couldn’t understand. In one case, hunters came across two Franklin Expedition survivors who had been sleeping for days in the hollowed-out corpses of seals.

“They were unrecognizable they were so dirty,” Lena Kingmiatook, a resident of Taloyoak, told Eber.

Mark Tootiak, a stepson of Nicholas Qayutinuaq, related a story to Eber of a group of Inuit who had an early encounter with a small and “hairy” group of Franklin Expedition men evacuating south.

“Later … these Inuit heard that people had seen more white people, a lot more white people, dying,” he said. “They were seen carrying human meat.”

Even Eber’s translator, the late Tommy Anguttitauruq, recounted a goose hunting trip in which he had stumbled upon a Franklin Expedition skeleton still carrying a clay pipe.

By 1850, coves and beaches around King William Island were littered with the disturbing remnants of their advance: Scraps of clothing and camps still littered with their dead occupants. Decades later, researchers would confirm the Inuit accounts of cannibalism when they found bleached human bones with their flesh hacked clean.

“I’ve never in all my life seen any kind of spirit — I’ve heard the sounds they make, but I’ve never seen them with my own eyes,” said the old man who had gone out to investigate the Franklin survivors who had straggled into his camp that day on King William Island.

The figures’ skin was cold but it was not “cold as a fish,” concluded the man. Therefore, he reasoned, they were probably alive.

“They were beings but not Inuit,” he said, according to the account by shaman Nicholas Qayutinuaq.

The figures were too weak to be dangerous, so Inuit women tried to comfort the strangers by inviting them into their igloo.

But close contact only increased their alienness: The men were timid, untalkative and — despite their obvious starvation — they refused to eat.

The men spit out pieces of cooked seal offered to them. They rejected offers of soup. They grabbed jealous hold of their belongings when the Inuit offered to trade.

When the Inuit men returned to the camp from their hunt, they constructed an igloo for the strangers, built them a fire and even outfitted the shelter with three whole seals.

Then, after the white men had gone to sleep, the Inuit quickly packed up their belongings and fled by moonlight.

Whether the pale-skinned visitors were qallunaat or “Indians” — the group determined that staying too long around these “strange people” with iron knives could get them all killed.

“That night they got all their belongings together and took off towards the southwest,” Qayutinuaq told Dorothy Eber.

But the true horror of the encounter wouldn’t be revealed until several months later.

The Inuit had left in such a hurry that they had abandoned several belongings. When a small party went back to the camp to retrieve them, they found an igloo filled with corpses.

The seals were untouched. Instead, the men had eaten each other.

It would cause a scandal in the U.K. when the first evidence returned of what had befallen Franklin’s men.

Britons had imagined that if the expedition was indeed lost, it had almost certainly met a noble, “British” death.

That would be the case in the Antarctic 60 years later when a party led by Robert Falcon Scott was killed while returning from the South Pole.

Recovery teams found the Scott expedition men frozen to death in their tent alongside flowery letters praising the glory of England.

“After all we are setting a good example to our countrymen, if not by getting into a tight place, by facing it like men when we were there,” read Scott’s last letter.

But no triumphant letters were recovered from Franklin. Instead, it was the Scottish explorer John Rae who returned with Inuit testimony that the expedition had descended into madness and cannibalism.

No less than Charles Dickens would lead a crusade to discredit Rae, accusing the Scot of trusting “the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilised people, with domesticity of blood and blubber.”

But for all Dickens’ talk of English superiority, it was these “uncivilised people” who had been on the receiving end of an invasion of wraithlike pale-skinned cannibals.

In 1854, Rae had just come back from a return trip to the Arctic, where he had been horrified to discover that many of his original Inuit sources had fallen to the same fates they had witnessed in the Franklin Expedition.

An outbreak of influenza had swept the area, likely sparked by the wave of Franklin searchers combing the Arctic. As social mores broke down, food ran short.

Inuit men that Rae had known personally had chosen suicide over watching the slow death of their children. Families had starved for days before eating their dog teams. Some women, who had seen their families die around them, had needed to turn to the “last resource” to survive the winter.

“These poor people know too well what starvation is, in its utmost extremes, to be mistaken on such a point,” read Rae’s icy reply to Charles Dickens.

OTTAWA — Opposition parties joined forces Thursday to press the Trudeau government for new cash they say is urgently needed for health care for First Nations and Inuit youth.

NDP and Conservative MPs — along with every MLA in the Manitoba legislature — also condemned the Trudeau government for failing to obey nine-month-old directives from the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal which found the federal government guilty of systemic racism and discrimination against indigenous youth when it came to health care services.

For its part, the federal government said it had embarked on a new round of consultations with provincial and territorial authorities to address the problem and tapped a top bureaucrat to be Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett “special ministerial representative” on the file.

“We are committed to nothing less than a full scale reform of child and family services on reserve and are undertaking that reform in partnership with the provinces and territories and First Nations,” Bennett told the House of Commons.

That is what systemic, racist discrimination looks like

The Trudeau government, in its first budget last spring, set aside $634.8 million over five years to address the “immediate needs” of children on reserve including $71 million for relief this year.

The NDP say that’s not enough and, in a motion tabled Thursday by New Democrat Charlie Angus, they asked for an additional $155 million immediately.

The Conservatives are likely to support that motion when it comes to a vote next week.

“Normally I and my party are reluctant to call on the government to spend additional money because, frankly, the current government has an incredible spending problem,” Conservative MP Cathy McLeod, a nurse, told the House of Commons. “But there are times when there is an exception, and clearly in this case we are talking about the most vulnerable children in Canada and the tribunal ruling that found systemic discrimination in welfare programs by underfunding people on reserve compared to the funding that people off reserve would receive.”

Angus, whose riding includes Attawapiskat and Kashechewan, two of the country’s most troubled ridings, connected the broken child welfare system directly to a rash of suicides over the last year by indigenous young people.

HandoutNDP MP Charlie Angus

Angus reminded the House about an aboriginal girl in Alberta whose family has asked the government three times to foot the $8,000 bill for some orthodontic surgery to correct a condition that makes it painful for her to eat and talk. Instead of paying for the surgery, the government has spent $32,000 on legal fees fighting the requests for payment by the girl’s family. The case may yet end up court and, if it does, it the feds could spend $100,000 in legal bills to avoid an $8,000 surgery bill.

“That is what systemic, racist discrimination looks like,” Angus said. “I want to see the government stand up today and tell us that that little girl in Alberta will not have to worry that her teeth are going to fall out because she is being denied service while government lawyers are fighting her family.”

Angus spoke of another case where an aboriginal boy was denied an audiology test recommended by the boy’s physician because a federal bureaucrat decided it was not necessary.

“I was stunned when I saw that because my daughter was born deaf and we were told that for every month we lose is a chance that our daughter would never get into school. We had to move immediately,” Angus said.

Liberal MP Kevin Lamoureux was among those who argued against Angus’ motion, suggesting that provinces and other stakeholders should join the federal initiative to completely reform the system.

Ironically, Lamoureux’s daughter Cindy was among the members of the Manitoba legislature that voted unanimously Wednesday to “condemn the federal government’s inaction in equitably funding social services for First Nations people.”

Cindy Lamoureux, who represents the provincial riding of Burrows, was one of three Manitoba Liberals that joined the majority Progressive Conservative MLAs and the official opposition NDP MLAs in support of that motion.

In the House of Commons debate, Bennett said that, since July, 900 indigenous children have benefited from health care provided under what is known as Jordan’s Principle.

Under Jordan’s Principle, when a child presents itself to any government department — federal, provincial or territorial — for health care, that department must provide it even if that department believes another level of government should pay for that service.

The child gets the care required and then, after the fact, governments can sort out jurisdictional squabbles with regards to payments.

Critics say Jordan’s Principle has not been fully implemented and, as a result, the health care needs of many First Nations children languish while governments argue over jurisdiction. The girl in Alberta who needs orthodontic surgery is a case in point.

“There may be 900 more children getting it, but the full principle of Jordan’s principle is that all children in First Nations deserve equal medical treatment, and the Liberals are not complying with that,” Angus said.

The principle is named after Jordan River Anderson, who died in hospital in 2005 at age 5. For two years prior to his death, the province of Manitoba and the federal government could not agree on who should pay the bill for his complex medical needs.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/trudeau-government-under-pressure-to-improve-healthcare-for-first-nations-and-inuit-children/feed4stdI should have written down the names of the all these kids. They were pretty cute. And they seemed kind of excited that the prime minister of Canada and a bunch of journalists with cameras had come to visit them. Not sure they knew why.HandoutInuit — once relatively cancer-free — now have highest lung-cancer rate in the world: studyhttp://news.nationalpost.com/health/inuit-once-relatively-cancer-free-now-have-highest-lung-cancer-rate-in-the-world-study
Tue, 26 Jan 2016 16:21:41 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=997674

When Frankie Best asked three groups of Nunavut students if lung cancer or other smoking diseases had killed someone close to them, the stunning response was the same each time.

Nearly all the Inuit young people put up their hands to indicate they had been touched by cigarette-related death, recalls the tobacco-control specialist.

A new, international study makes clear why.

It found the Inuit of Canada and other countries – once relatively cancer-free – suffer from the steepest rate of lung cancer anywhere in the world, a striking illustration of how southern lifestyles can upend far-northern peoples.

The phenomenon is blamed on off-the-scale smoking rates, officially pegged by Statistics Canada at about 63% of adult Inuit, even worse according to local research.

Nunavut-led surveys indicate that more like eight in 10 of the territory’s mostly Inuit population smokes – a remarkable five times the rate in the general Canadian population, says Best.

And about 90% of Inuit women puff during pregnancy, she says.

“Smoking provides huge challenges to our health system, and it has huge societal impacts,” says Natan Obed, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national Inuit organization. “It’s something that people think about every day, whether they are smokers or non-smokers.”

In response, territorial governments are pumping millions into an array of anti-smoking programs , some of them stressing that smoking is not a traditional part of Inuit culture – a message underscored in Nunavut by the tagline “Tobacco has no place here.”

There are early signs of success, such as the many people who now avoid lighting up inside their often-cramped homes.

Justin Tang / Canadian PressNatan Obed, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, seen in November, 2015.

“People do go outside and smoke, even in minus-50 and minus-60-degree weather, and that’s an enormous success,” said Best, who works for the Nunavut health department.

Yet the new study has a sobering caution: even if smoking and other risk factors are dramatically reduced today, the lag time in the appearance of tumours means it will be “decades” before the disease rates drop.

The article just published in the International Journal of Circumpolar Health tracked rates of various cancers among different ethnic populations around the Arctic.

Co-authored by Kue Young, dean of the University of Alberta’s public health department, it found cancers that once were rarely seen in the far north, including breast and colorectal, are an increasing concern generally.

Most notable is the rising rate of lung cancer among the 165,000 Inuit of Canada, the United States and Denmark, the researchers concluded.

People do go outside and smoke, even in minus-50 and minus-60-degree weather.

“Cancers such as lung and breast can be viewed as an indicator of the rapid social, economic and environmental changes that Arctic populations, especially indigenous peoples, are experiencing” say the researchers from Canada, U.S., Finland and Denmark.

Though some First Nations people in southern North America have used tobacco ceremonially for centuries – and even introduced it to Europeans – it was not a part of Inuit life until the 1700s.

That’s when whalers, fur traders and other Europeans began arriving in the communities, and tobacco was slowly introduced to Canada’s northernmost indigenous group.

Smoking rates in the general population peaked in the 1960s, before newfound knowledge of the health risks precipitated a steady drop – to about 15% today. But why did the Inuit not butt out at a similar rate?

It may be partly because smoking has become an integral part of social life in a harsh land, said Obed: “It helps them through the day.” Meanwhile, the Inuit’s other modern challenges – from poverty to food scarcity and mental-health problems – have tended to monopolize attention, he said.

“Our lives have been hard and a lot of people don’t see it as their primary concern,” said the Inuit leader. “That isn’t necessarily an excuse, it is just a reality.”

Anti-tobacco campaigns are made more difficult by the great distances between remote, fly-in communities, but there are indications – beyond just people smoking outside – that attitudes are changing, said Best.

When she and colleagues ask who the “cool kids” in school are, teenagers inevitably point to the minority who do not smoke.

“We hear from young women … that they don’t want their children to smoke, and they wish their Mom had told them not to smoke when they were growing up,” said Best.

“People recognize that they don’t run so fast in soccer, play so hard in hockey if they smoke. They understand it does affect their health.”

There’s a new buzzword rolling off the tongues of Canada’s university administrators: indigenization.

Campuses are looking for new ways to welcome aboriginal students, recruit aboriginal faculty members and embed indigenous content in the curriculum. Some schools are even requiring all students — no matter what their specialization — to take at least one indigenous studies course before they graduate.

While many are hailing these developments, some academics are urging schools to proceed cautiously: Don’t lose sight of the whole Canadian story.

“I feel many of our affirmative action projects have to tread lightly,” said Jill Scott, a Queen’s University professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures.

Many of our affirmative action projects have to tread lightly

“In Canada, in particular, one of the things I think about is many Canadians identify as immigrants … There are many stories of survival, hardship, struggle that go with that. Turning all those people, all of a sudden, into settlers who’ve displaced indigenous peoples is tricky and quite often leads to acrimony.”

As schools contemplate ways to address long-term redress and reconciliation, they have to “find some way for all of those stories about who we are to co-exist,” she said.

In its report on the legacy of Canada’s residential school system, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called on the government and post-secondary institutions to address the backlog of First Nations students seeking university education and to integrate more indigenous knowledge and teaching methods in the classroom.

BRYAN SCHLOSSER/Regina, Leader-PostPhotos of the Walking with our Sisters exhibit at the First Nations University of Canada in Regina Monday Nov. 25 2013.

Some schools have begun to heed the call.

Starting next year, every undergraduate at the University of Winnipeg and Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., will have to take at least one indigenous studies course.

Wab Kinew, the University of Winnipeg’s associate vice-president of indigenous affairs, said the aim is to give students a “baseline of knowledge” about First Nations, Metis and Inuit people.

“Whether or not you have indigenous blood, if you’re here in Canada, some part of your identity has been formed by indigenous culture and people. Yet it hasn’t always been included or celebrated,” he said.

Kinew said students will be able to choose from a range of courses. While one student might take a history course focused on residential schools, another might delve into the Cree language.

Whatever the course, Kinew says he is “hopeful this will mean future doctors are going to have a little more sensitivity in their practice or future educators are going to know how to incorporate (awareness of indigenous issues) into the classroom or future engineers will have a better idea how to carry out local consultations when designing their projects.”

At the University of Regina, where the word “indigenization” or “indigenizing” appears 11 times in the school’s five-year strategic plan, all students in the Faculty of Arts must take an indigenous course.

Thomas Fricke for National PostWab Kinew outside of the Winnipeg City Hall.

The school, whose aboriginal student enrolment has shot up 63 per cent in the past five years, has also created an indigenous advisory circle to give guidance to the president and set up an aboriginal student centre.

In Calgary, Mount Royal University’s strategic plan is similarly looking to establish “aboriginal-themed coursework” as a graduation requirement. The school is also developing an indigenous research policy, a separate indigenous student recruitment plan, new aboriginal concentrations, aboriginally themed field schools and an indigenous languages curriculum.

While Scott says she is “thrilled” schools are taking recommendations seriously, she’s not convinced mandatory courses are right for every school. She fears mandatory courses will take on the feeling of being “pro forma,” like mandatory safety training classes in the workplace.

“How seriously do we take that?” she said. “You’re probably like I am, we don’t like to be told what to do.”

That said, Scott says she supports greater emphasis on indigenous recruitment and finding creative ways to incorporate indigenous knowledge in courses — not only history and literature, but engineering and the sciences.

Damien Lee, a PhD candidate in native studies at the University of Manitoba, suggested recently on his blog the universities’ approach doesn’t really meet the definition of true reconciliation — and amounts to nothing more than “learning more about Indians.”

“I therefore wonder how useful it will be to indigenous nations when students come knocking on their doors having taken a half-credit course about indigenous culture(s) without also equipping these same students with an understanding about how their approaches might perpetuate a relationship where Canada justifies its regulation of indigenous peoples, and their political and legal systems.”

Doing something in this area is better than us doing nothing

Responding to the University of Saskatchewan’s plans to “indigenize” the school, Satya Sharma, a retired professor of religion and culture, wrote in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix this summer this was “not a desirable goal at all” and likely “impossible to implement.”

“Even if it is an achievable goal, it will be something designed by non-indigenous people for indigenous people. It will smack of a different kind of colonialism, but colonialism nevertheless.”

But what’s the alternative, Kinew asks.

“Do nothing? Provide no baseline of knowledge? I appreciate the input that critical theory can make building an insight in the indigenous space, but we shouldn’t use those things as an excuse for inaction,” he said.

“I think us doing something in this area is better than us doing nothing.”

Just like “safe spaces” and “micro-aggression,“ “cultural appropriation” seems to be one of those concerns that Canadians — other than sensitive souls on the country’s university campuses — refuse to take seriously.

Which is why, when actual, real-life, cultural appropriation happened to a family in Nunavut, we could have been forgiven for thinking it was just more trumped-up outrage fetishism.

In its fall collection, the U.K. fashion designer Kokon To Zai (KTZ) unveiled a $900 sweater that featured an unusual pattern of circles, squares, human forms and — directly over the chest — the shape of two human hands.

When CBC North producer Salome Awa spotted the sweater, she immediately recognized it as an almost exact copy of a garment owned by her great-great grandfather, the shaman Qingailisag.

“This is my great-grandfather’s sacred garment copied right down to the T … there has to be some kind of mechanism in place to say you just cannot copy aboriginal or Inuit designs and make money off it,” she said.

k-t-z.co.ukSince-removed image of the $900 sweater from the KTZ website.

The sweater’s most prominent feature, the hands over the chest, were designed by Qingailisag to protect himself from drowning. As CBC noted, an image of Qingailisag in the garment was published in a compendium of Inuit writing, which may be where KTZ spotted it.

In a world littered with iffy accusations of culture-theft, this is the real deal. A white-guy equivalent would be the Ontario descendant of a United Empire Loyalist waking up to discover their family crest had been slapped on the crotch of a new line of designer panties. Or the son of a war casualty finding that Dad’s service portrait was being used in a Chinese ad for shampoo.

The Inuit generally have no problem with people paddling kayaks or wearing parkas, both of which they invented.

And when an Inukshuk was picked as the symbol for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, the choice got the endorsement of both the government of Nunavut and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the body representing Canada’s 55,000 Inuit.

But Kokon To Zai didn’t design a sweater that took a few Inuit design cues or made a subtle reference to Arctic culture; all scenarios that, in other circumstance, might have spurred more dubious accusations of “cultural appropriation.”

“This is a stolen piece … there is no way that this fashion designer could have thought of this exact duplicate by himself,” Awa told CBC.

Tellingly, KTZ fessed up to the deed almost immediately. It pulled the item from its catalogue, issued a public apology and delivered the requisite lines arguing they were just trying to “celebrate multiculturalism” and that they have all kinds of “ethnic backgrounds” on their staff.

But the lesson of the KTZ fiasco is that before sounding the trumpets of cultural appropriation, consider the following:

Is it a blatant and verifiable copy of something exclusive to that culture? A feathered headdress is obviously a Plains First Nations thing, but dying your hair blonde and braiding it doesn’t mean you’re ripping off the Scandinavians.

Does it have sacred or religious meaning? Recreationally wearing a yarmulke, for instance, is a bit different than eating a latke.

And is the person raising the complaint part of a group that is directly affected by the alleged culture crime?

If the answer to any or all of the above is yes, you may be looking at a bona fide case of insensitivity to an important element in a recognized culture. If the answer is “no,” then think twice before crying wolf about cultural appropriation.

In the Inuit regions of Labrador, the word “son” is written as “Innik.” Cross the border into Arctic Quebec and the word becomes “Irniq.” Skip across Hudson Strait onto Baffin Island, and the word is now a series of syllabic symbols that — to non-Inuit—might look like a triangle, a whistle and several elevated squiggles.

In the Inuit regions of Labrador, the word “son” is written as “Innik.” Cross the border into Arctic Quebec and the word becomes “Irniq.” Skip across Hudson Strait onto Baffin Island, and the word is now a series of syllabic symbols that—to non-Inuit—might look like a triangle, a whistle and several elevated squiggles.

It’s all the same Inuktitut word. But in the linguistic maze of the Canadian Arctic, the roughly 40,000 speakers of the Inuit language use no fewer than nine different writing systems and two alphabets.

“Linguists have told us Inuktitut is one of the hardest languages to learn as a second language,” said James Eetoolook, vice-president of Nunavut Tunngavik, the corporation governing the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement.

And it’s why — after decades of planning — Canada’s Inuit are now hammering out a plan to unite the entire Arctic under a single Roman-lettered language.

“There’s been talk of this for years; it’s not new,” said Jeela Palluq-Cloutier, the Inuit-language coordinator for ITK, the organization representing all Canada’s Inuit.

But it’s only recently that ITK has formed Autausiq Inuktut Titirausiq, a task force of eight representatives — two from each of Canada’s four Inuit regions — to figure out a common standard to be understood from Inuvik to Labrador.

Just last month, the task force made news in the Arctic by recommending the system abandon Inuit syllabics and stick strictly to Roman orthography.

“With language erosion, we have to figure out a better way for young people to read and write in our language,” said Jeannie Arreak-Kullualik, one of two Nunavut representatives on the task force.

Like many Canadian Aboriginal groups, the Inuit had no written language before the arrival of European missionaries. But the size and inaccessibility of Inuit territory meant different churches made contact with different regions at different times.

In the 1700s, Moravian missionaries taught the Labrador Inuit a written language based on the Roman alphabet. On Baffin Island a few decades later, Anglicans were teaching a symbol-based system known as Inuktitut syllabics.

By the time aircraft, snowmobiles and radio communication hit the Arctic, Canada’s Inuit suddenly realized they couldn’t read each other’s Bibles.

Most Southern Canadians are familiar with syllabics, the iconic symbol-based language used on stop signs and public buildings in Iqaluit.

But that version of written Inuktitut is only used in Nunavut and Northern Quebec. Even then, usage varies wildly.

Elders use old syllabics, while most of Nunavut uses an updated system developed in the 1970s. Speakers of the Natsilingmiut dialect, who live near the last known whereabouts of the Franklin Expedition, employ four more characters used by nobody else.

“So, the syllabic writing system is all over the place,” said Eetoolook.

Inuit leaders have been discussing a unified script since the 1970. But as might be expected with an effort to revamp a written language across 160,000 kilometres of Arctic, the idea has been controversial.

At times, Inuit elders even saw the proposal as sacrilege. Since certain Inuit Bibles were originally penned in syllabics, translating them into Roman orthography was seen as disrupting the word of God.

Even now, “the move to completely switch over to Roman orthography was not taken lightly by Inuit in the eastern Arctic as they have a deep attachment to it,” said Eetoolook.

“Many associate syllabics with their Inuit identity.”

But what’s changed Inuit minds this time around is education. The wide variance of written Inuktitut — and the difficulty of learning syllabics — has resulted in young Inuit abandoning the tongue for English.

In 2009, linguist Aurélie Hot surveyed syllabic literacy across parts of Nunavut, and found only teachers and translators were using it daily.

“There seem to be a vicious circle that keeps the status of Inuktitut at the level of a symbolic language,” said Hot in a 2010 interview with the Iqaluit-based Nunatsiaq News.

For fear of offending any particular region or speaker, Inuit leaders are urging a very careful approach to designing the unified language. As Arreak-Kullualik said, it will be carefully designed not to disrupt regional pronunciations “it will be like saying ‘potato’ in one region and ‘po-tah-to’ in another.”

And even then, once the language is complete, the plan is only to place it into the school system.

The really tricky work — swapping out syllabics traffic signs and translating government documents into the new script — will have to wait until a future when the unified language generation has come of age.

“We could see, ten to fifteen years down the road, that it’s a possibility that syllabics will be phased out,” said Palluq-Cloutier.

The language might stay in the education system, she noted, but in history class.

The tiny Inuit hamlet of Clyde River has lost a bid to block seismic testing off the shores of Baffin Island.

The Federal Court of Appeal has denied the community’s request for a judicial review of a permit that allows the tests.

Mayor Jerry Natanine, who called the ruling “a big blow to Inuit rights,” said he hopes to continue the fight before the Supreme Court.

“We won’t stop our fight here,” Natanine said Tuesday in a release distributed by Greenpeace, which has been supporting Clyde River’s efforts.

“We will be appealing this decision to the Supreme Court of Canada. We will also be continuing our work to bring people’s attention to this issue.”

In June 2014, the National Energy Board approved plans from a three-company consortium to begin five years of seismic tests in the Davis Strait, up and down the entire length of Baffin Island. The testing would use loud, high-intensity sounds to help map the sea floor and the geology underneath.

Adrian Wyld/ The Canadian PressSunlight breaks through heavy clouds to illuminate waters of Baffin Island near Iqaluit, Nunavut.

The tests are strongly opposed by the people of Clyde River, who argue the testing will disturb or harm seals, whales, walrus and other marine mammals that locals depend on for food.

The hamlet was joined in its opposition by all the communities on Baffin Island, regional and territorial Inuit groups and the Nunavut Marine Council, which represents Nunavut’s wildlife management bodies. In a rare example of Inuit teaming up with southern activists, a wide spectrum of 44 non-governmental groups and individuals also supported Clyde River, including Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and Amnesty International.

In Tuesday’s written judgment, Justice Eleanor Dawson agreed with the Inuit that the board owed them a high level of consultation, including a voice in how the tests are conducted.

The consultation process does not give aboriginal groups a veto

But she added that consultation doesn’t necessarily mean agreement.

“The consultation process does not give aboriginal groups a veto on what can be done with their land pending final proof of their claim,” she wrote. “Perfect satisfaction is not required.”

Dawson pointed to numerous meetings that began in 2011 between the proponents — a Norway-based consortium — and the people of Clyde River. She also noted that the permit was issued with conditions to undertake any scientific research needed to understand the underlying ecology of the water.

She found parts of the project were altered at the request of Clyde River and that local people are to have ongoing input into it.

On Aug. 3, six boats carrying hunters from Clyde River, Nunavut, converged on a pregnant bowhead whale and, in a dramatic 90-minute struggle that saw explosions, a flurry of harpoon thrusts and the loss of one of the boats, the 60-foot-long animal was brought to heel.

It was the community’s first whale hunt in more than 100 years, and exuberant locals were still peeling muktuk (fatty skin) off the whale’s hulking carcass when congratulations flowed in from one of the most unlikely sources imaginable: Greenpeace.

The group whose name is synonymous with Save the Whales put out a press release to “honour” the people of Clyde River for taking out a mammal still considered endangered in parts of the Arctic.

“Greenpeace respects the rights of Clyde River and other indigenous communities to sustainable, traditional hunting and fishing,” said Greenpeace Arctic campaigner Farrah Khan in a statement.

Ansgar Walk / WikimediaInuit woman and child standing on a bowhead whale after a 2002 subsistence hunt in Igloolik, Nunavut in 2002.

The gesture is all part of Greenpeace’s new strategy to “make amends with indigenous peoples” and make common cause with them to ban Arctic oil drilling. For more than 30 years, Greenpeace’s role in the anti-sealing campaigns have made it the bitter enemy of Arctic people. Across Nunavut, the group is not only blamed for kneecapping one of the region’s only sources of income, but for driving once-proud hunters to welfare dependency and suicide.

No matter their feelings on Arctic oil, as Greenpeace returns to Canada’s North for another high-profile public relations campaign, many Inuit remain deeply suspicious of whether the group suddenly has the best interest of “indigenous peoples” in mind.

“Our young men started committing suicide in the 1970s because people couldn’t feed their families anymore,” said Rosemarie Kuptana, a former president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, an international organization representing the world’s 160,000 Inuit.

Greenpeace, she said, has never acknowledged “that there’s a whole generation of young people today who grew up without fathers.”

Ansgar Walk / WikimediaThe community of Clyde River, Nunavut.

Only a few years after its 1971 founding in Vancouver, Greenpeace was at the forefront of efforts to condemn the Canadian seal hunt. By 1976, Greenpeacers were venturing out onto ice to physically push seals out of the way of East Coast sealing ships. Later, they would graduate to spraying the animals with non-toxic dye to make their coats unusable.

FileFrench film star Brigitte Bardot in an undated photo.

And in 1977, the organization famously brought French actress Brigitte Bardot to Newfoundland, where she criticized seal hunters as “Canadian assassins” and posed for a series of famous photos of her snuggling a puppy-like seal on the ice.

“I think about these poor little creatures who live so peacefully, with no defence against their attackers. I feel sick,” she wrote in an account of her trip.

Driven by public pressure, Europe banned the import of whitecoat harp seal pups in 1983. Although the Inuit could still hunt, the ban demolished the market for seal skins. In some Northern communities, annual seal hunting revenue reportedly dropped from $50,000 to as low as $1,000.

“You could not find a more thoroughly discredited brand, from one end of the Arctic to the other, than Greenpeace,” said Madeleine Redfern, a former mayor of Iqaluit, writing in an email to the National Post.

“Thirty-five years after Greenpeace’s initial anti-sealing campaign, Nunavut Inuit suffer extremely high rates of malnutrition and poverty, with seven out of 10 Inuit preschoolers being food insecure,” she said.

In June, Joanna Kerr, Greenpeace Canada’s executive director, published an op-ed in the Nunatsiaq News, Nunavut’s primary newspaper, aiming to “set the record straight” on Greenpeace’s role in the seal hunt.

“Our campaign against commercial sealing did hurt many, both economically and culturally,” she wrote.

Greenpeace had “decolonized,” she said, and was now translating its materials into Gwich’in and Inuktitut, had hired “three talented, passionate indigenous women” and had drafted an official policy on indigenous rights.

Just this month, the latest celebrity delegation Greenpeace flew to the Arctic even made sure to include an aboriginal, Canadian actress Michelle Thrush. Of course, Ms. Thrush is Cree and grew up in Calgary, several hundred kilometres south of the tree line.

With Greenpeace now launching the massive campaign “protect the Arctic from the oil companies,” Ms. Kerr said it would work to “acknowledge the power of indigenous knowledge.”

Greenpeace, to be fair, has never openly opposed traditional indigenous hunts. Unlike its most radical contemporaries, such as the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the group’s campaigns have always been directed against commercial sealers and whalers.

In its Nunatsiaq News editorial, Greenpeace blamed other organizations and the federal government for roping “everyone into the same basket,” but nonetheless acknowledged “the role we played in the unforeseen consequences of these bans.”

This time around, though, it is the similar threat of “unforeseen consequences” that is prompting Inuit leaders to condemn Greenpeace’s overtures to make nice.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan DenetteApex overlooking Frobisher Bay, Nunavut is pictured on March 28, 2009.

“As far as Greenpeace goes, they’re there for their own agenda and their own purposes,” said Duane Smith, president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council speaking to the National Post by phone from Ottawa.

Nunavut MP Leona Aglukkaq was more blunt in a July address to the Inuit Circumpolar Council, in which she alleged that Greenpeace was merely trying to manipulate Northerners.

“Other people who are not our friends will try to use Inuit as weapons in their own battles,” she said.

Ms. Kuptana said she shared some of Greenpeace’s concerns about oil exploration and seismic testing, but resented that it would launch an Arctic campaign without calling up a single Canadian Inuit organization.

“They don’t respect our values or our traditions or our fundamental human rights by installing this campaign without any Inuit input,” she said.

In May 2013, for instance, Greenpeace gathered together a council of various northern indigenous people to sign a document declaring “there is a growing opposition to Arctic oil drilling amongst indigenous communities.”

Although about half a dozen representatives from Canadian First Nations signed the document, the delegation did not include any Canadian aboriginals who actually occupied the Arctic Coast.

Immediately, Canadian Inuit groups at the time shot back that they wanted no part in Greenpeace’s campaign “pitting indigenous peoples against Arctic resource development.”

“Inuit have not endorsed this statement and position, which appears to be a Greenpeace-orchestrated campaign against resource development in our very own lands and waters,” said Terry Audla, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the non-profit advocate for Canadian Inuit.

Earlier this year, however, Greenpeace received its first Inuit allies when the largely Inuit community of Clyde River enlisted the eco-organization’s help in opposing federally approved seismic testing in Baffin Bay.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian WyldInuit students pose in sealskin jackets during a rally on Parliament Hill Tuesday March 18, 2014 in Ottawa.

“The people of Clyde River were facing a huge threat and asked Greenpeace if we would support them in their fight,” said Ms. Khan in an email to the National Post.

“We hope that through further conversations, we will find that we share values and goals with others as well,” she said.

Ms. Redfern, the former Iqaluit mayor, said the people of Clyde River had turned to Greenpeace after no other Inuit organization or leader went to bat for them, calling it “an illustration of the huge and growing gulf between Inuit and their political institutions.”

Despite this, she said she has no time for Greenpeace coming back to the North.

“Greenpeace needs an icy, sparkly backdrop for their fundraising pantomime and has appropriated an entire region,” she said. “Who cares about Inuit education, housing, health, when Greenpeace and starlets are going to ‘Save the Arctic’?”

A U.S. celebrity chef has come to the aid of Canada’s subsistence seal hunters, calling a Canadian seafood boycott by fellow chefs over the seal hunt ‘‘dangerous and misguided.’’

Television host Anthony Bourdain, criticizing chefs who had signed a petition promising to boycott Canadian seafood unless the hunt were stopped, said on Twitter many far north communities have little access to affordable western-style food. Banning the seal hunt in its entirety “dooms the indigenous people above [Arctic] circle to death or relocation,’’ he said on Monday.

In a statement to the National Post on Tuesday, Mr. Bourdain elaborated: “I do not consider myself a spokesman for anyone. I am simply a man with an opinion— and will continue to voice that opinion when moved to do so. I find the precedent set by chefs boycotting the many for the behaviours of a few — whose practices they disapprove of — dangerous and misguided.”

Should these chefs boycott all Japanese products over whaling? Chinese over finning? Where do these tactics end?
Canada an easy, PC target

Mr. Bourdain was moved to support the hunt after witnessing an Inuit family kill and eat a seal in northern Quebec. The segment was filmed for his show, Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations in 2006. In it, he witnesses an Inuit man kill a seal with a high-powered rifle and drag its carcass back home, where it is shared and eaten raw with his family. The seal was gutted on the kitchen floor: Mr. Bourdain was given a prize eyeball.

In a tweet on Monday, he pointed to an article showcasing a $28 head of cabbage: “Read this before suggesting First Nation people adjust their diets to our comfy standards.”

I feel bad for the well meaning chefs who got roped into this
@fandw Canada boycott unaware of the implications or nuances. Not right.

The Humane Society of the United States, which sponsored the boycott, said Mr. Bourdain was spreading misinformation.

“The Chefs for Seals campaign does not target the subsistence hunting of native and local peoples,” said Kathryn Kullberg, the director wildlife protection. “It’s targeted specifically at seals that are harvested for the fashion industry.”

So far, 6,500 restaurants, grocery stores and outlets had agreed to the boycott of Canadian seafood, she said. A further 800,000 individuals had also signed a pledge in support of the program.

The organization also highlighted 42 chefs who agreed to the boycott had also recently been among those top chefs named in a high profile magazine.

Ms. Kullberg said the Humane Society decided to target Canada’s seafood industry because the same boats that killed seals were also used to fish.

“Each spring on the East Coast of Canada, 10,000 seals are shot and clubbed to death,” she said, including pups who have “not even eaten their first solid meal.”

According to a website maintained by the Government of Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the commercial seal hunt has been in rapid decline since 2008.

In 2012, almost 70,000 harp seals were killed for commercial purposes, an increase from the year previous, but a major decline from the 355,000 seals harvested in 2006. Pelt prices dropped significantly after both Russia and the EU banned imported pelts.

Nathan Vanderklippe/Postmedia News/FilesAn Inuit hunter from Resolute Bay, Nunavut, waits over a hole in the ice for his prey.

Meanwhile, the seal population is believed close to recent highs; the numbers are so healthy, in fact, that fisheries officials have said they fear the impact on valuable cod stocks.

“I think it’s unfortunate that at a certain point, a legal and sustainable hunt is pushed to the point where people are moved to think they should boycott an entire industry,” said Todd Perrin, a Newfoundland chef with 20 years experience who often serves in-season seal meat at his restaurant, the Mallard Cottage. “The information that made these chefs sign onto this boycott is inaccurate.”

“We’ve used all of it, every piece of the animal right down to the seal leather, loins, flippers, the seal oil. It’s a nose to tail creature, to us. We don’t just take the pelt and throw the rest away,” he said.

Mr. Bourdain’s advocacy may convince some people to become better-researched about the issue, Mr. Perrin hopes.

“The more people talk about it, the better. The facts of the matter is that [the hunt] is regulated, it’s as humane as anything can be that involves killing another thing,” he said. ‘‘How this gets singled out for such treatment is always perplexing to us in this part of the world.”

On the edges of downtown Oslo, Norway — thousands of kilometres from the closest Inuit settlement — sits one of the world’s most comprehensive catalogues of Inuit life.

The Museum of Cultural History holds hundreds of examples of harpoons, reindeer-skin clothing, eating utensils and even full-sized sledges, all obsessively collected by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in a bid to emulate the Inuit way of life and ultimately use it to conquer both the Northwest Passage and the South Pole.

Now, in what locals say is a testament to the continued links between the Inuit and Amundsen’s home country, 14 of those artifacts have been repatriated to a permanent display in their original home.

Andrea Hill/Postmedia NewsNetsilik artifacts brought back to Norway by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in 1906 are now on display at the Oslo Museum of Cultural History.

“There were 900 plus pieces, and I just wanted a couple,” said Joanni Sallerina, deputy mayor of Gjoa Haven, Nunavut, and a lead proponent in the repatriation effort.

The artifacts, which include a harpoon, a bow and arrow, a kudlik oil lamp and a Shaman’s belt, will be used to keep “our youth educated about how hard it was to live at that time; not having housing, not having rifles and so forth,” said Mr. Sallerina.

Andrea Hill/Postmedia NewsNetsilik artifacts brought back to Norway by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in 1906 are now on display at the Oslo Museum of Cultural History.

A community of 1,200 on Nunavut’s King William Island, Gjoa Haven was Amundsen’s home for two winters from 1903 to 1905, on the initial leg of his three-year traverse of the Northwest Passage.

The settlement takes its name from Amundsen’s vessel, a small converted fishing boat named the Gjøa, and it was there, among the Netsilik Inuit, where Amundsen amassed the massive collection now housed in Oslo.

“I got samples of literally everything these Eskimos possessed, from suits of clothing worn by both sexes, young and old, to samples of every kind of implement they had for cooking, sledding, and the chase,” wrote Amundsen in his 1927 autobiography, My Life as an Explorer.

By the end of the voyage, the tiny vessel was piled so high with Arctic treasures that it resembled a “moving-van afloat!” he wrote.

The explorer’s zeal for tokens of Inuit life apparently attracted some consternation from his crewmates.

“They complained about it in their different diaries,” Tone Wang, head of the exhibits department at the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History, told Postmedia last month. “They said, ‘he’s going completely crazy: he’s stuffing this tiny little boat with ethnographic materials.”

The provenance of some of these artifacts similarly attracted criticism from the Inuit. “A lot of them were traded, some were gifts, a few were taken from graves,” said Mr. Sallerina.

Nevertheless, Amundsen retains a rare distinction among North American explorers for having forged a positive connection with an aboriginal group that stands to this day.

“I think Amundsen was able to communicate and work with the Inuit around this region because he didn’t really force anything onto them,” said Mr. Sallerina. Amundsen was also the first to introduce firearms to the region — a major boon to local hunters.

As recently as 2010, Norwegian officials have travelled to Gjoa Haven for commemorative flag-raisings, and in June, Mr. Sallerina was a guest in Oslo for the grand opening of a new museum building housing the restored Gjøa.

In fact, as Norway moves to repatriate Inuit artifacts, Nunavut is similarly in talks to repatriate Amundsen artifacts back to Norway.

COURTESY/ FRAM MUSEUMHow the Maud looked in the early 1900s.

Last summer, a Norwegian group was cleared to raise and reclaim the Maud, an Amundsen-commissioned vessel that sunk off the coast of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut in 1930.

Andrea Hill/Postmedia NewsNetsilik artifacts brought back to Norway by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in 1906 are now on display at the Oslo Museum of Cultural History.

For decades, Gjoa Haven even asserted it had a blood link to the explorer in the form of a mysterious baby, Luke Ikuallaq, who was born soon after Amundsen’s departure. Only last year, however, did a Norwegian-sponsored DNA test confirm that the baby’s descendants, Bob Konona and Paul Ikuallaq, had no relation to the adventurer.

With Inuit artifacts in the collections of virtually every major ethnographic museum around the world, artifact repatriation was one of Nunavut’s top priorities upon the territory’s founding in 1999.

However, given the brittle nature of the skin, wood, sinew and bone artifacts, a lack of climate-controlled museum facilities in Nunavut has ultimately hampered repatriation attempts.

Gjoa Haven’s collection was donated only after the installation of a set of air-conditioned cases in the hamlets’ newly constructed Netsilik Cultural Centre.

The exhibit is set to open in October, just as soon as the sea ice clears to let in a barged-in shipment of new furniture.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean KilpatrickPrime Minister Stephen Harper wife Laureen, left, and Minister of Aboriginal Affairs Bernard Valcourt, right, watch Boyd Konana, 7, as he displays traditional dress during a community event in Gjoa Haven, Nunavut on Wednesday, August 21, 2013.

New data from Statistics Canada’s National Household Survey shows that 1,400,685 people had an aboriginal identity in 2011,
or 4.3% of the total Canadian population. The aboriginal population increased by 232,385 people, or 20.1% between 2006 and 2011, compared with 5.2% for the rest of Canada’s non-aboriginal population. Projections show that the aboriginal identity population
in Canada could be 2.2 million by 2031.

]]>galleryNA0511_Aboriginal_C_RJ620NA0511_Aboriginal_C_RJ940dThe Inuit-language bible it took 34 years to translate is now available as an apphttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/the-inuit-language-bible-it-took-34-years-to-translate-is-now-available-as-an-app
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/the-inuit-language-bible-it-took-34-years-to-translate-is-now-available-as-an-app#commentsTue, 02 Apr 2013 00:55:17 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=286527

An Inuit-language bible that took 34 years to translate is now available as an app.

Last week, an Inuktitut option was added to a free bible app published by YouVersion.com, the online publishing arm of an Oklahoma-based megachurch.

The text comes from a three-decade long collaboration between the Anglican Church and the Canadian Bible Society to translate both testaments into Eastern Arctic Inuktitut.

“We’re happy to have this out of the way,” Rev. Canon Jonas Allooloo, who was with the translation team since its 1978 inception, told the Post at the time. “It’s been 34 years and we can do something else now.”

Dedicated just last June in Iqaluit, the Inuktitut bible was prepared by a small team of Inuit translators who painstakingly bridged the many linguistic gaps between millennia-old Middle Eastern texts and a language developed by Arctic-dwelling hunter-gatherers.

Related

Although it is not the first Inuktitut bible, it is the first to be completed by native speakers, rather than missionaries.

Plugging Inuktitut into the app took a bit longer than usual owing to the language’s unique alphabet, according to a report by the Iqaluit-based Nunatsiaq News. Inuktitut is one of 245 languages offered by the app.

Although the bible is certifiably public domain, the same is not true for Canadian Bible Society translations. When quoting the Inuktitut bible, no more than 500 verses can be used without permission, according to copyright rules posted to YouVersion.com.

History will judge how the goal posts have shifted for aboriginal peoples as a result of the Idle No More protest movement. But after a month of national focus on First Nations issues, I have to say that it is positive to see all sides of the political spectrum take genuine interest in these matters.

Canada’s Inuit — the indigenous peoples who populate the Arctic — have observed this ongoing political process with interest. But Inuit are not members of Canada’s “First Nations,” as that term has come to be defined — and our circumstances will require different solutions.

The Inuit have signed five modern, comprehensive land claim agreements (from 1975 to 2008), but we are experiencing strained relations with the Crown over their implementation. We have chosen the route of arbitration, and ultimately litigation (in the case of Nunavut), as the method of obtaining justice. As with our modern Inuit land-claim agreements, we believe the Crown should better honour the historic numbered treaties signed with First Nation Indians between 1871 and 1921.

The Inuit homeland in Arctic Canada, which we call “Inuit Nunangat,” includes 53 communities spread over a massive geographic region, including significant areas of two territories and two provinces. These communities are municipalities, not reserves. All but one (Inuvik) have no permanent road links to the rest of Canada. Tuktoyaktuk and Aklavik have winter ice roads, and soon Tuktoyaktuk will have a permanent road. Up in the North, that counts as progress.

Related

Housing, health and hunger top the list of critical issues for Inuit, with education also a top priority. Inuit suicide and tuberculosis rates are many times higher than the national average. We have consistently made submissions to government to address these issues, and will continue to do so.

It is vital that the critical issues identified as priorities for Inuit are substantially addressed. The Arctic is experiencing a resource-development boom. The economies of some Inuit communities will change significantly as a result. We want to ensure that our youth are well prepared to take advantage of the resource-development jobs that exist, and those being planned.

To do so, our communities will need better infrastructure, notably more social housing, health facilities and policy measures designed to address the high cost of living. Inuit have developed a national plan to address improvements in our education system, and we are implementing that plan in co-operation with provincial and territorial governments, as well as the government of Canada.

Reducing consultations with aboriginal peoples, obfuscating significant regulatory changes inside dense omnibus bills and accelerating environmental reviews for the benefit of resource-development firms is not the way to “improve relations.” It’s a recipe to have aboriginal policy developed by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Having said that, it would be disingenuous to say that Canada is not addressing issues in our communities, and working with Inuit to find solutions. Stephen Harper has visited the Arctic many times, and has held cabinet meetings there, as well as a G7 finance minister’s meeting in Iqaluit in 2010. Arguably because of these frequent visits, the Prime Minister knows much work is needed to transform the dismal statistics that plague our communities. Life expectancy among Inuit is 13 years lower than the average Canadian. Less than 25% of Inuit graduate from high school. Sadly, there are many more indicators I could cite.

Seals are not endangered and polar bear populations are increasing. That’s an inconvenient truth that
the usual activist crowd doesn’t want you to know about

We are also being challenged from abroad by those who would seek to end our way of life for the supposed benefit of the animals that share our environment. Seals are not endangered, and polar bear populations are increasing under our successful co-management. That’s an inconvenient truth that animal-rights activists and environmentalists don’t want you to know about.

Long lists of critical issues that need addressing are prevalent among the Inuit I represent. As the national Inuit leader, I could be in permanent outrage mode with the Crown. But instead of casting the relationship between the Canadian government and its indigenous peoples in black-and-white terms, I would prefer to commend Environment Canada officials, and our Canadian ambassadors abroad. They are helping us battle Goliath, both in our attempt to challenge a European Union seal ban in EU courts, and to counter efforts to list polar bears as endangered under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. For Inuit, that means putting food on the table. That’s a bread-and-butter issue I think all Canadians can relate to.

You don’t see a lot of Inuit traveling south to attend Idle No More protests, for the same reason most Canadians don’t visit the Arctic: It costs $5,000 for a return flight to Ottawa from Grise Fiord, Nunavut. Inuit support the movement, but we’re a pragmatic people.

I encourage all Canadians to see first-hand the plight of Inuit and aboriginal peoples in Canada, to seek assistance in doing so from the federal government, and to encourage incentives so that all Canadians may see the vastness of our great country and what makes us a true Arctic nation. Expansion of our collective understanding within our own borders can only benefit us as a united country.

National Post

National Inuit Leader Terry Audla is president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami.

Emails were sent out on school board letterhead on Thursday, advising parents that schools would be closed on Friday, because of the planned teacher protest on Friday. Early Friday, the union sent the teachers back into class, well beyond an acceptable time to notify the Ontario families whose lives had already been disrupted. Can we, Ontario citizens, demand that the union be fined $20,000 and the teachers $2,000 for this action? My kids lost a day of school on account of these illegal tactics and there should be a consequence. Gordon Akum, Toronto.

The time has come to pass right to work legislation for teachers. This will allow each one to decide whether or not to associate with a union — a right that is the true basis of democracy. Our best teachers are the ones who truly put children first over union politics. Let’s support their democratic right not to associate with a union, if they prefer, and not to pay union dues as a condition of employment.
Support school “safe workplace” policies for teachers so that those who choose to forgo union representation will be protected from the bullying tactics that union members often use to punish non-union supporters. Gene Balfour, Thornhill, Ont.

But what about the human rights of teachers?

In my Grade 8 English class this year I taught my students about human rights. We read all 36 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and we talked about places and times where human rights were violated; Canada did not come up in that conversation.
I taught them about Iqbal Masih who was killed for standing up for his human rights and Malala Yousafzai who is the same age as them and was shot for standing up for her human rights.
On Friday, I had to stand in front of them a hypocrite. My own human rights were being violated; violated to the point that I am not even allowed to protest in their defence. My students will come to class knowing that Article 23(4) of the UDHR gives me the right to join a trade union for the protection of my interests, a right nullified by Bill 115. They will expect me to stand up for this right by protesting. They would expect this because they know that Article 20 of the UDHR gives me the right to freedom of peaceful assembly, a right taken away by a decision of the Ontario Labour Relations Board.
The Premier and Minister of Education would have you believe that by protesting against the government’s actions I would not be doing my job as a teacher simply because I wouldn’t be in class. You would be wrong; by protesting the violations of my human rights I would precisely be doing my job: teaching students to stand up for themselves. Brett Coburn, York Region District School Board, Vaughan, Ont.

Isn’t it so very ironic that outgoing Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty:
— helped squander hundreds of millions of hard-working taxpayers’ dollars in ill-conceived projects so now there’s none to be had for valuable services and our kids’ teachers,
— has the gall to ask teachers to take responsibility for their actions while he prorogued government so he and his merry cohorts wouldn’t have to provide answers to the public about their misdeeds, and
— urges teachers to offer extra, unpaid after-school programs while our Ontario government representatives collect salaries for months while not working?
Shame on you, Mr. McGuinty. Nellie Jacobs (author of Grading the Teacher), Toronto.

Sounds familiar

Re: TDSB Head Resigns Amid Scandal, Jan. 11.
Thank you for the excerpt from Chris Spence’s resignation letter. It appears, however, to be lifted verbatim from many other such letters released over the years. Ferguson, Dundas, Ont.

Media chill on Russian cold snap

Re: Stand By For More Heat Waves, letters to the editor, Jan. 11; British Experts Cool On Global Warming, Jan. 9.
No surprise that readers bring the current hot weather in some parts of the world into the discussion but fail to mention the extreme and prolonged record-breaking cold recently endured in Russia and Ukraine particularly. On Dec. 19, the semi-official Russia Today reported: “Russia is enduring its harshest winter in over 70 years, with temperatures plunging as low as -50 C. Dozens of people have already died, and almost 150 have been hospitalized.”
­Yahoo Singapore reported on Dec. 26th, “Experts say that the cold snap, Russia’s longest in decades …”. At some point, the Daily Telegraph showed some photos of the Russian cold, but did not apparently report in print. The Independent provided some news from other eastern European countries but gave no idea of the scale and record-breaking nature of the cold. And it was briefly mentioned in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Apart from these exceptions, only such sources as the Drudge Report drew attention to the cold snap. The only left-wing source to mention it was the Huffington Post and that only in an attempt to refute its significance.
But The New York Times, the Associated Press, the BBC, the CBC, CNN, etc., did not mention the cold in Eastern Europe, as far as I could tell by searching online.
The cold weather in Russia does not prove or disprove anyone’s theory of global climate trends, but the fact that some media outlets treat it as a kind of state secret tells us something. Lionel Albert, Knowlton, Que.

An apt word

Re: Aim Is Important, letter, Jan. 10; Pee On The Bee, letter, Jan. 9; Helping Males To ‘Hit The Mark,’ letter, Jan. 7.
The Dutch understand the relevance of context to the call of nature, as I learned firsthand in Amsterdam. Basked in a hued light, late at night with nary a washroom in sight, I exercised the only option and had the misfortune to be cited for the infraction.
The inscribed charge on the ticket: Wildpissen. Simon Dermer, Toronto.

What hospitals can learn from the aviation industry

Re: Mistakes Plague Pediatric Wards, Jan. 11.
Canada’s aviation industry has an enviable safety record based in no small measure on continuous trend monitoring of individual aircraft, systems and pilot performance. One cannot help wondering how many lives could be spared annually if Canadian hospitals adopted similar standards of safety, trend monitoring and unbiased accident/incident reporting?
When an aviation incident, accident or fatality occurs, everyone including manufacturers, regulators, companies and pilots move quickly to identify the cause and prevent its recurrence. Perhaps we need a Canadian Hospital Safety Board charged with an investigative role similar to that of the Transportation Safety Board of Canada. E.G. (Ted) Lennox , president, LPS AVIA Consulting, Ottawa.

How a community came together

In June, 1953, Elizabeth II was crowned, and I, a newly ordained minister of the United Church of Canada, and my wife, a teacher (we worked then, and still do, as a team) were given a special assignment.
We were appointed as the first ministers of the new and rapidly growing squatters’ community — then about 150 families. It was called, Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador. However, for a number of reasons, it had become a divided community.
Our main task was to visit and meet with all the people — a mixture of Inuit, Innu and white fishers and trappers — of the three major denominations (United Church, Anglican and Moravian) and to help them come together as a community. The self-constructed homes were on federal land, near the Goose Bay military air base, the major provider of employment in the area.
It took us a month to visit all the homes, and to organize and hold special meetings. At a general meeting, virtually everyone voted to form a union-church community council. The community is now a thriving one and a municipality of nearly 8,000 people. Rev. Lindsay G. King, Markham. Ont.

Another tale of survival on the ice

Re: Stranded Inuit Hunter Saves Rescue Pilot, Jan. 11.
We read with interest and relief, the story of the Hudson’s Bay rescue of Joe Karetak and son, Joe Jr., from Arviat, Nunavut. The Karetaks are a very prominent Inuit family from the west coast of Hudson’s Bay. Some of the other family members are: Nancy Karetak-Lindell, former two term Liberal MP; Nellie Karetak-Kusugak, Nunavut’s Deputy Commissioner and educator; her son, Puujuut Kusugak, Mayor of Rankin Inlet and educator; and his late father Jose Kusugak, who has been called the “Last Father of Confederation” for his role in the formation of Nunavut.
In 1955, my husband, Lino Mascotto, was a young RCMP constable transferred to Eskimo Point N.W.T., now Arviat Nunavut. One of the two RCMP Eskimo special constables was Johnny Karetak, both 25. That was at the end of an era when the Inuit, then known as Eskimos, mostly still lived in snow houses and travelled by dogteam. Johnny had several children at this time, and his eight month old daughter Nellie charmed my husband.
Johnny and Lino often travelled together by dogteam patrol to visit the Eskimos living out on the land. At one time, they spent six weeks stranded in a tent, on the land, waiting during spring break-up for the arrival of an aircraft to transport them back to Eskimo Point. The black flies were thick and they were without protective nets. Their food supply was also dwindling rapidly. Johnny Karetak was able to fish, shoot a goose and a caribou to feed the pair. At least the atmosphere was relaxing, as Johnny spoke little English and Lino almost no Inuktituk.
They have remained close friends ever since and Lino and I have returned by invitation, to Rankin Inlet to visit with Johnny, his wife Rhoda, and family in 2000. Johnny is the patriach of the Karetak family and has always championed his childrens’ skills of living on the land. Valanne Mascotto, London, Ont.

The meaning of ‘jihad’

Re: But What About Calls For ‘Jihad’?, letter to the editor, Jan. 10.
Letter-writer Kyle Matthews of The Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies calls on the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) to explain the religious meanings of jihad and its obligations. I would point him to the RCMP’s publication Words Make Worlds, which offers a succinct analysis of the term, and the contemporary deviation of its original meaning as primarily defining a personal struggle to overcome personal shortcomings and come nearer to God.
Further to this personal struggle, one can struggle to promote justice in one’s own community, or defend oneself against oppression or attack. However, there is no justification for aggression or indiscriminate violence anywhere in the Koran, and even in defensive battle, the Prophet Muhammad forbade the killing of all non-combatants. He additionally forbade attacks on places of worship, cutting down of trees and called for the humane treatment of prisoners. Ihsaan Gardee, executive director, Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, Ottawa.

Inuit women outnumber Inuit men in Nunavut public service jobs almost three to one, the widening gender gap in the territory’s workforce spurring researchers to study what’s keeping men out of the formal economy and out of post-secondary education.

The rest of Canada, like the rest of the world, has also seen women increasingly graduate post-secondary schools and enter the well-paid workforce at a higher rate, but the scenario is magnified in the North — a region where bureaucracy is new and the culturally entrenched seal, polar bear and caribou hunts now have far less market value.

Traditional male-female roles are still very entrenched in Inuit culture, experts say, and in many ways men are still the providers as they head out on the hunt every spring when the seals are calving and bring food home for their families. But that hunt doesn’t pay the bills the way administrative jobs — the ones filling newspaper classified sections and filled by women — do.

To get those jobs, one needs an education. While girls sit down, focus, and study, boys haven’t been graduating at the same levels, said Noel Kaludjak, one of the researchers with the Nunavut Literacy Council-run Northern Men’s Research Project, which is gathered in Ottawa this week to plan the early stages of its three-year pan-northern study to kick off in January. Girls are also more likely to leave home to find a job, he said.

In his work as a counsellor running a men’s group in Coral Harbour, Mr. Kaladjuk has heard from men dissatisfied by the new reality — grappling with abuse issues, largely stemming from their own fathers, and meeting barrier after barrier when it comes to finding work.

“We’re not trying to put man higher up than woman, we’re just trying to help them be as they’re supposed to be,” he said from Ottawa on Tuesday.

According to Nunavut government statistics, 1,191 Inuit women worked in the public service in March, 2011. In the same month, only 377 Inuit men filled such jobs — the numbers quite likely affected by the timing of the hunt. Unemployment is also rampant (hunting and gathering doesn’t count as employment), Mr. Kaludjak said, and when a person’s on social assistance, rent can go up when a paycheque arrives.

A once nomadic people has become sedentary in recent decades, and this sedentary work may be better geared towards soft skills passed down from generation to generation amongst Inuit women, said Terry Audla, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national organization representing Inuit people.

“Inuit men have always played a large role in providing for the family but the dynamics of it have definitely shifted,” he said. “He was the hunter, going out on the land, preparing the equipment and the dog team … whereas the woman stayed home and put together everything the family needed for clothing. And to a certain degree that would be a little bit more static as opposed to the man going out every day to try and gather and harvest the seal, caribou or the polar bear.”

In this way, the new “non-Inuit lifestyle” of having to stay indoors and work is “more in tune” with women, he said.

Men are still under pressure to go out and hunt, Mr. Audla said, “and if you don’t do well in school, what alternatives do you have?” There’s a need for balance, so men can work at paying jobs that use their traditional skills and go off to hunt during the spring season.

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But the education system is getting better at addressing the way Inuit boys learn, said Pujjuut Kusaguk, a former high school teacher and the current mayor of Rankin Inlet. The Arctic College Trade School has opened up and will take on male students who learn in a more hands-on way, amid hopes of an expanded mining industry.

Meanwhile, the territory’s education department is also embarking on a community-based study called the Young Men’s Engagement Initiative to find out how to re-engage young men in their education. The surveying will also begin in January. The department’s director of assessment and evaluation Donald Mearns says they’ve already started introducing “land programs” that teach hunting and small engine repair.

“It’s about making males think of jobs and work in a different way,” he said. “Jobs and work that were predominately male orientated – the mechanic, hunter, fisher, gatherer — those are things guys are still very interested in because, as I say, there are very few men who have made their way into office work and school work and things like that.”

National Post

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/entrenched-in-tradition-inuit-men-grapple-with-wideneing-gender-gap-in-nunavuts-workforce/feed2stdWhile girls sit down, focus, and study in school, boys haven’t been graduating at the same levels, said Noel Kaludjak, one of the researchers with the Nunavut Literacy Council-run Northern Men’s Research Project, which is gathered in Ottawa this week to plan the early stages of its three-year pan-northern study to kick off in January.CLICK TO ENLARGEInnu nation angry as former chief paid $1M in two yearshttp://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/innu-nation-angry-as-former-chief-paid-1m-in-two-years
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/innu-nation-angry-as-former-chief-paid-1m-in-two-years#commentsSat, 14 Jul 2012 01:31:21 +0000http://news.nationalpost.com/?p=194047

Jeremy Andrew is 27 years old and tired. Tired of being disappointed by Innu leaders in Sheshatshiu, NL., tired of asking questions that never seem to have answers, tired of waiting for things to change in a place where nothing ever seems to.

“It pisses me off,” says Mr. Andrew, an Innu Nation board member and facilities manager at the local high school.

“It” is the latest in an ongoing series of scandals buffeting the tiny Innu village in Labrador, not far from Goose Bay. A document listing the salaries of several employees of the Innu Development Limited Partnership — a private enterprise owned by the Innu people whose mission is to broker deals with non-aboriginal companies looking to do business on Innu lands — was leaked to the community by an unnamed insider.

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It revealed that Paul Rich, the ex-CEO, and a former band chief, was paid $658,847 in 2011 — and in excess of a million dollars in his last two years combined as head of the IDLP. In years past, the CEO drew a salary closer to $100,000.

“Nobody should be making $650,000,” says Mr. Andrew. “Not when you have so many people in the community unemployed and an overall lack of programs and social services to help the people.

“All of that’s completely being ignored. Our kids are being born and taken into foster care — because we have alcoholism, high rates of drug use and a lack of jobs. We have some serious problems here.”

Innu Nation/Flickr“Nobody should be making $650,000. Not when you have so many people in the community unemployed and an overall lack of programs and social services,” Sheshatshiu resident Jeremy Andrew said.

Several community members gathered at the IDLP office in Sheshatshiu on Friday, plastering the buildings red façade with neon green and pink placards. “Leaders is misleading our people,” read one; “How long has this been going on?” read another.

People are demanding that the RCMP investigate, that the IDLP crack open its books, that the corporation started, and owned by the Mushuau and Sheshatshiu First Nations — for the benefit of the community — makes its paper trail public.

Paul Rich, the man under the microscope, could not be reached for comment. Rumours are swirling as to his whereabouts. Some believe he has left the community, others say he is lying low. Nobody has seen him for days.

Messages left at the IDLP office were not returned.

Allegations of corruption play like a broken record in the village with a population of 1,054. Eight months ago it was another leaked document, a different scandal. Back then a letter on Sheshatshiu Innu First Nation letterhead, signed by Chief Sebastian Benuen, and obtained by the National Post, surfaced. It was a request for funds addressed to the band’s corporate trust administrators at the Bank of Montreal branch in St. John’s.

Joe Gibbons/The Telegram filesChief Sebastian Benuen

Chief Benuen, the letter stated, required a “payout — in the amount of $20,000 each” to two unnamed members of the community for their “services” plus an additional “$50,000 in administration fees to compensate [Sheshatshiu Innu First Nation] for the additional costs incurred with these pay-outs” — plus an additional “$90,000 for administration fees.”

Protests erupted.

Taniana Benuen, the besieged chief’s wife, allegedly vandalized the local radio station after the announcer, Angela Gregoire, began taking calls from the public to discuss the letter’s contents.

“She beat up the radio station,” Ms. Gregoire told the National Post in November. “It was the chief’s wife.”

A petition was circulating calling for Chief Benuen to step down. He didn’t. Now his name has surfaced on the leaked IDLP document. He sits on the IDLP’s four-member board, a position that paid $38,000 in 2011.

“It is frustrating, and the only thing I can do is speak out,” Mr. Andrew says. “These board members have the power to change things, the power to reveal what was going on at the IDLP. How much money has gone into the IDLP without anybody knowing where it is being spent, or where it’s going — or whether it is even benefitting the community or just benefitting a select few?

“The truth needs to come out. Transparency is the main issue right now, and accountability, too. It’s fine to be transparent, but if you’re not held accountable — what’s the point?”

When you read the childhood histories of Manasie Ipeelee and Frank Ladue, the two men at the heart of Friday’s Supreme Court of Canada judgment, the experience makes you appreciate why Parliament originally passed a law giving special legal treatment for aboriginal convicts: Before they became monsters, both men were children who never had any real chance in life.

Ipeelee, a 39-year-old Inuk from Iqaluit, had an alcoholic mother who died when he was a child. Ipeelee himself was an alcoholic by the time he was 12.

Before he turned 19, he already had 36 convictions. Several of them involved instances in which he had beaten other men into submission — and then continued stomping on their heads even after they had lost consciousness. In another case, he raped a homeless woman while punching her in the face.

Ladue, a 50-year-old member of the Ross River Dena Council, an hour’s flight northeast of Whitehorse, saw both his alcoholic parents die when he was a child. He was sent to a residential school when he was just five, and began drinking at nine, and then graduated to drugs. Beginning in the 1980s, he began sexually assaulting women — typically when they were drunk or unconscious.

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There is little hope of any kind of “rehabilitation” for either of these men. They are lifelong addicts who have sadism programmed into their tragically wounded souls. But oh how we try. In Ladue’s case, the Correctional Services of Canada even tried to send him to Linkage House in B.C., so he could receive “culturally specific” support from an Aboriginal Elder.

If only taking the monster out of the man were that easy. The whole concept of “alternative sentencing” for aboriginals — encoded in Section 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code — is built on the idea that natives somehow can be deprogrammed from crime if they are permitted to reconnect with their communities in a positive way. And no doubt, that sort of special treatment may work for, say, young runaways from aboriginal reserves who fall prey to big-city gang life. But it is naïve to think that men such as Ladue and Ipeelee belong anywhere except prison.

The specific question addressed by the Justices in their Friday judgment was whether aboriginal-sentencing principles apply specifically to men classified as “long-term offenders” — meaning they’ve shown a pattern of reckless and violent criminality — who, like both Ipeelee and Ladue, have been judged in breach of long-term supervision orders. On an expansive reading of Section 718.2(e) and associated case law, the Court majority said yes. But the more persuasive opinion is the dissent by Justice Marshall Rothstein.

Cutting through the somewhat mushy, competing standards that govern criminal sentencing, Rothstein emphasizes that “protection of the public” must be “the paramount consideration in setting the timing and conditions for [a prisoner’s] release.” He also notes that by the time a convict has been slapped with a long-term supervision order, it’s already clear that “rehabilitation and reintegration” (the goals of alternative sentencing) “are not being achieved.” Even if all of a defendant’s problems can be traced to residential schools and drunken parents, that doesn’t mitigate the threat of continuous and brutal violence that he poses to the community.

And more often than not, the community under threat from released aboriginal prisoners is, itself, aboriginal — which means that it is primarily aboriginal men whose heads are at risk of being stomped, and aboriginal women at risk of rape, once the prisoner is set loose. “Aboriginal communities are not a separate category entitled to less protection because the offender is Aboriginal,” Justice Rothstein writes. “Where the breach of a [long-term supervision order] goes to the control of the Aboriginal offender in the community, rehabilitation and reintegration into society will have faltered, if not failed.”

Fine words — and they deserve to be read by legislators. When Section 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code came into being in 1996, it originally was interpreted narrowly. That changed with the Supreme Court’s 1999 decision in R. v. Gladue, in which the Justices appointed to themselves a broad social-justice mandate. Now, every aboriginal defendant presents a “Gladue report” at his sentencing hearing. Aboriginal Justice Strategy programs have proliferated. R. v. Ipeelee is part of this trend.

Justice Rothstein has sensibly reminded us that there should be limits to all this — that in the case of serial rapists and thugs, protecting real innocent lives is more important than abstract social justice principles; and that career sadists do not become reformable simply because they happen to be aboriginal.

Stephen Harper’s government prides itself on getting tough on crime, yet has spent too much of its time pursuing the wrong targets — such as soft-drug users. If the Prime Minister wants to help protect citizens, and especially aboriginals, from truly violent criminals, reforming Section 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code so as to exclude long-term offenders would be a sensible, and popular, path.

Several yeas ago my daughter and I took the ferry from Prince Edward Island to the Magdalen Islands, a small chain of islands in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, which are part of the Province of Quebec.

Only 13,000 people inhabit the islands year-round, but tourists flock there in the summer. Most of the islands are connected by land bridges, but sailing in from P.E.I., as the main archipelago comes into view, a ship passenger sees Entry Island, unconnected to the rest of the chain and separated by 12 km of water.

Entry Island has about 130 inhabitants and can only be reached by sea or air. A ferry arrives twice a day from May through December and the island has regular airplane service from January through April.

While in the Magdalen Islands, my daughter and I visited the Anglican priest, whom we knew from Montreal, and he told us that about once a month he went to Entry Island, where all the families are English-speaking, to hold services. Our friend also explained that the provincial government pays for a teacher to live year-round on Entry Island and offer elementary school education to the local children.

As we sailed away from the Magdalen Islands, it occurred to me that in Canada, we see it as reasonable and proper that families like those of Entry Island should have regular transportation services and a public school in their own community, yet similar spending on Aboriginal communities is often viewed as a waste.

As a lawyer, I work almost exclusively for Aboriginal communities. An increasing amount of my time is spent dealing not with land claims or hunting or fishing rights, but funding for programs and services.

Since sailing past Entry Island, I no longer see a reason why my clients should apologize for the amounts their communities cost the taxpayer. Unfortunately, I now think that when Canadians complain these communities cost too much, they are demonstrating an unconscious form of racism.

These thoughts came back to me during the recent controversy about Attawapiskat, a Cree community of 1,900 people situated on the western coast of James Bay in Ontario. It is connected to the outside world only by air, water and an ice road accessible in the winter.

Attawapiskat attracted national attention after declaring a state of emergency on October 28, 2011, due to a severe housing shortage. Many Canadians were shocked when the Red Cross was called in to help.

Several commentators were quick to suggest that the best solution for Attawapiskat would be to shut the community down and move residents to the south, near urban areas.

It seems obvious that this would simply move the poverty elsewhere. The residents of Attawapiskat are predominantly Cree speaking. They live some 1,000 km north of Toronto. The nearest town of any size is Moosonee, which has only 3,500 inhabitants itself, is not connected to the rest of Ontario by road (only by rail and air) and had an unemployment rate three times the provincial average in 2006.

Moreover, Aboriginal leaders have asked why their people should be moved off their land at the precise moment when hundreds of millions of dollars can be made from its resources.

Paying jobs are finally available near Attiwapiskat because the mineral wealth of the Crees’ traditional lands is now being explored and exploited. Only 90 km from the reserve, De Beers has opened an open-pit diamond mine employing over 500 workers. Thanks to an impacts and benefits agreement negotiated by the band council, about 100 of those workers are from Attiwapiskat.

Another fundamental question for me is why so many believe we owe so little to the people of Attawapiskat, despite the fact that our federal government entered into a solemn agreement with them in the form of Treaty 9.

Treaty 9 was among the last in a series of “numbered” treaties signed by Canada from the 1870s till the 1930s, with First Nations from northern Ontario to the Rocky Mountains. First Nations surrendered their title to land and in return, the federal government promised them small annual payments, reserves, and the right to hunt and fish throughout their territory.

Representatives of the Crown met with chiefs who usually could not speak English and had them sign legal documents, usually with an “X”. From the government’s point of view, the land had been cleared of competing claims and was ready for settlement. From the Aboriginal point of view, the Crown had promised to protect their way of life.

The Attawapiskat Cree only “adhered” to Treaty 9 in 1930 and in Ontario’s far north, settlers did not follow negotiation of the treaty. As a result, little changed for the Attawapiskat Cree so long as they could still live off the land by hunting, fishing and trapping.

But the 1950s and 1960s saw a terrible combination of circumstances for remote Aboriginal communities like Attawapiskat. The fur trade ceased to offer a viable livelihood at the same time that the federal government pressed the Cree to settle permanently on reserves and enforced attendance for their children in residential schools. The communities were emptied of their children and the parents sat on the reserves waiting for them to return.

Community members had little else to do if they could not hunt, fish or trap. In Canada, infrastructure of all kinds (railroads, highways, schools, hospitals) has always been built for white settlers, for their farms, mines and factories. If Aboriginal communities happened to be nearby (like the Mohawk communities of southern Quebec and Ontario for instance), they benefited from that infrastructure, but if they lived in remote areas like Attawapiskat, they remained isolated.

Even the Indian residential school experience reflected this reality: attendance was most widespread in remote communities were the government did not want to build schools. The federal government took the children out of these communities to more centrally-located residential schools and left them there, sometimes for the school year, sometimes for years at a time.

Since the 1950s, the federal government has progressively provided Indians on reserve with most of the services the provinces provide to other Canadians, such as health care, education, and social assistance. Since the 1970s, service delivery has been progressively delegated to the First Nations themselves.

However, the federal government does not usually take on services to First Nations as binding legal obligations: funding depends on the annual budget and on a Minister’s discretion. Services such as local policing, for example, may simply stop from one year to the next, to be replaced by a distant provincial police detachment.

Moreover, federal funding for services to First Nations does not have to match the level of provincial funding for the same services off reserve. Often, federal funding is lower, even though the First Nations who administer programs are expected to meet provincial standards.

The result in an area such as education is that Indian Affairs provides per capita budgets below the provincial averages to reserves where needs are greater than the in the rest of the province. Communities already faced with the challenge of serving deprived populations in remote locations like Attawpiskat become trapped in a downward spiral of underfunding and underperformance.

During the Attwapiskat controversy, the Prime Minister cited the $90 million in funding provided to the community during the preceding five years and called the results inadequate. But how generous was this funding when Council was providing municipal, educational and health care services, as well as housing, all at a location no car or truck can reach in summer and where the cost of building a single home is $250,000?

Nor are First Nations unaccountable. The Auditor General has reported that their councils file literally hundreds of financial reports every year to various federal government departments. The Minister of Indian Affairs reacted to Attiwapiskat’s crisis by placing the council under “third party management”, a form of trusteeship the Minister reserves the right to impose when a First Nation’s deficit reaches a set proportion.

The most important point, however, is that things do not have to be this way. Clear evidence contradicts the commentators who insist that the problems of remote First Nations can never be solved, that no amount of money will make things better, that we must shut down communities like Attawapiskat and encourage their residents to leave their traditional lands.

Just across James Bay, on the east coast, the example of the Cree and the Inuit living in Québec proves that life could be much better for communities like Attawapiskat. Life in the Cree and Inuit villages of Québec is far from perfect, but it is significantly better than in the Cree communities of northern Ontario.

Unlike the James Bay Cree of Ontario, no one asked the James Bay Cree and Inuit of Québec to sign a treaty as a pre-condition to development. On the contrary, the Québec government announced in the early 1970s that the James Bay hydro-electric project would flood their traditional lands without even informing them of its plans.

The Québec Cree and Inuit went to court to stop the James Bay hydro project and obtained an injunction, though it was quickly set aside on appeal. Settlement negotiations with the federal and provincial governments led to the James Bay and Northern Québec Agreement (JBNQA), the first modern land claims agreement, signed in 1975, after which the project went ahead.

Among other things, the JBNQA left the Cree and the Inuit with regional school boards, health and social services agencies, police forces and local government structures under their control. These institutions are funded jointly by the federal and provincial governments, to the same level as comparable bodies in the rest of the province.

The JBNQA also recognized their right to hunt, fish and trap and provided the Cree and the Inuit with a role in wildlife management and environmental assessment on their territory.

With the compensation paid to them for settling their land claims, the Cree and Inuit bought the airlines that serve their communities, among other businesses. Where Attawapiskat derives benefits from a single mine, the crucial role played by the Québec Cree and Inuit in deciding on the development of their territory has led to a growing role in many areas of the regional economy. In businesses such as mining, forestry or commercial fisheries, the Cree or the Inuit participate through royalties, employment, or ownership.

The question raised by the example of the Cree and Inuit of Québec is why they had to go to court and accept massive development on their lands in order to obtain the benefit of adequate locally-controlled services and economic opportunities of the kind we would consider a minimum for other Canadians?

The real question raised by Attawapiskat is whether all we promised its people in Treaty 9 were underfunded resources on unsustainable reserves and an invitation to move elsewhere if it does not suit them? Or is it possible that we owe them institutions and services of at least the same quality we take for granted in the rest of Canada and a chance to participate in the economic benefits that can be derived from their lands?

Image by Father Mary-RousseliereEulalie Angugasak with Bernard in her amauti Repulse Bay September 1953

Strangers who met him, for the first time, often described Father Guy Mary-Rousseliere as being aloof, detached and a little bit lost in his own inner-self.

A gangly limbed Roman Catholic priest, with a lean and upright bearing, Father Mary’s quiet reserve, like the priest’s collar he wore, was partly a disguise. The outer costume of a devoutly religious, yet also profoundly progressive man, who was living elbow to elbow with an Inuit culture dynamically different from the Western one in which the good Father, from Le Mans, France, was raised.

ArchivesFather Mary fishing at the stone weir Repulse Bay August 1951

Father Mary lived and worked in Pond Inlet, and parts thereabout in the Central and Eastern Canadian Arctic, from the 1940s until his death, at age 81, in 1994.

During that time he was an artist, an anthropologist, an archeologist, plus a preacher and a missionary. He was a complicated man and, above all, a witness — with a camera, tape recorder, sketchpad and a pen.

Largely unknown outside of his beloved North and beyond the office walls of the odd academic, Father Mary’s body of work — writings, recordings, drawings and the photographs seen here — are poignant snapshots depicting the Inuit people at a moment of transition.

“In his drawings and photographs you can see the proximity he had with the Inuit, the scenes he depicts, perhaps inside an igloo — these are quiet moments and they show how intimate he was with them and he was appreciated by them because of the man he was,” says Frederic Laugrand, an anthropologist at Laval University.

“But also what he showed in his work was a time period where Inuit were starting to live in settlements, and starting a new life. And he showed the tension between this life and the more traditional camp life that was away from the settlements. His work is extremely important.”

Father Mary’s photos, for example, of an Inuit family sitting on a bed in a shack with newspaper wallpaper, convey a story. There are tin cups on the table beside the bed. But the family members wear handmade sealskin boots on their feet.

Image by Father Mary-RousseliereAlain Maktar with his family (Leo, wife Therese, Rene and Joanie) in a qarmaq shelter

Here then was a culture with a foot in the past and a foot on the treadmill of what we, and what many of Father Mary’s contemporaries, called progress.

Father Mary understood exactly what was taking place, and while he spoke from the pulpit, and sought converts, he also spoke to the Inuit in their own language. Far from a colonizing priest, he went North in the 1940s and spent the next 50 years listening.

“I don’t see any contradiction between the study of God, in theology, and the study of man, created by God,” the priest said in 1952.

“Moreover, I think that anything that helps me to better understand the culture of the people among whom I live is justified.”

Father Mary’s photographs and sketches, or “cartoons” as he deprecatingly described them, are currently being showcased in the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut in an exhibition marking the 100th anniversary (in 2012) of the Catholic presence in the central and eastern Canadian Arctic.

Impressive as the photos are, of even greater importance were the voices that he documented. Father Mary would sit with Inuit elders for hours, traveling to their homes, their hunting camps, to listen to their stories. Oral tales, passed down from generation to generation, about the initiation rituals of a young shaman (think: no water for five days, no food for 10).

Or the origins of “white people,” a race, according to Inuit legend, that were cast out to sea by the Sea Woman in the soft sole of a mukluk with the simplest instructions: “Fend for yourselves without getting wet.”

Father Mary wrote everything down. Without him, many of these stories would have been lost. And he took his photographs, some of which appeared in long ago issues of National Geographic.

“Father Mary really took the Inuit culture seriously. He respected them, and in his day, that was not something that was easy to do,” prof. Laugrand says.

In the 1970s, he locked collars with Brigitte Bardot, the French movie siren who was campaigning against the seal hunt. The priest argued that hunting was integral to Inuit life, as was the Inuktitut language, an idiom that was under duress from government administrators during the 1950s and 1960s who believed the Inuit people would ultimately be assimilated into Western culture.

“In his own way, Father Mary was very conservative,” says prof. Laugrand. “For instance, he enjoyed doing the Mass in Latin and not adopting the [modernizing] ways of the Vatican II council.

“So there is a tension within the man. On the Inuit side he went very far, but on the other side he was very attached to traditional values. And I guess he applied those values to himself — but also to preserving Inuit traditional values.

“In many respects, he was a man ahead of his time.”

Father Mary died in a fire at the Catholic mission in Pond Inlet on April 23, 1994. He was an old man by then, a wise and somewhat eccentric elder of the church.

The deadly fire consumed countless artifacts, words and photographs of a complicated man with a sharp eye, a keen ear — and a largely forgotten legacy.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-priest-who-chronicled-the-north/feed2stdBlue Jays on short leash with umpires after Brett Lawrie's outburstImage by Father Mary-RousseliereMore...ArchivesImage by Father Mary-RousseliereArchives